Jonathan Swift s A Modest Proposal, And Thomas More s...

Jonathan Swift’s â€Å"A Modest Proposal,† and Thomas More’s Utopia both treat the poor, old, or sick similarly. Swift writes a mock proposal to eat the children of poor families, while More writes about an â€Å"ideal,† utopian society where the old and sick are told that they might as well just die. Both exaggerate the similarities between humans and animals in order to reveal to the public how they are treating these types of people in real life. The authors’ ideas are pushing how society deals with people to an exaggerated level to reveal what is really happening within the community. Swift and More both make analogies between humans and animal behavior to reveal to society how they are treating the poor like worthless animals. In More’s Utopia, the old and sick people are seen as a burden and should choose to die for everyone’s good. Priests tell these old and sick individuals that they are an annoyance on society. More writes, â €Å" ‘You’re just a nuisance to other people and a burden to yourself’ † (More 665). They live for no one’s good and are left to live a pointless rest of their life, so they might as well just end it now. More is revealing how society really sees the old and sick people. They know they should take care of them, and they do, but no one really wants to help them when it’s taking time away from their own life. People see more use in doing there own thing, so in Utopia, More pushes it to the level of trying to convince the the old and sick that they shouldShow MoreRelatedSir Thomas More And Jonathan Swift Essay1592 Words   |  7 Pagesboth in and out of its populations a kind of distrust. It remains to be seen if there is an ideal empire, but in conceptualizing the shortcomings of an empire s trajectories, there are significant observations to be made. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sixteenth and eighteenth century writings of Sir Th omas More and Jonathan Swift. Here, individuals for the first time interrogate the governmental systems which predate them to a particular effect, though their means are drastically different